Last Voyage for the Keeper of the Hubble

FIELD WORK Astronauts John Grunsfeld, anchored on the robotic arm from the space shuttle Columbia, and Richard M. Linnehan working on the Hubble Space Telescope during a mission in 2002.Credit
NASA

HOUSTON — John Grunsfeld was sitting in an astronomical meeting in Atlanta in January of 2004 when he got a message to come back to headquarters in Washington to talk about the Hubble Space Telescope.

To say that he was excited would be an understatement. As an astronaut, Dr. Grunsfeld had twice journeyed to space to make repairs on humanity’s most vaunted eye on the cosmos, experiences he had described to a high-level panel pondering Hubble’s fate only a few months before as the most meaningful in his life. He was looking forward to leading the third and final servicing mission, which had been delayed by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew the year before.

Thinking that the mission was now being scheduled, Dr. Grunsfeld raced to Washington, only to learn that Sean O’Keefe, NASA’s administrator, had canceled it on the ground that it was too risky. Wearing his other hat as NASA’s chief scientist, Dr. Grunsfeld now had the job of telling the world that the space agency was basically abandoning its greatest scientific instrument at the same time that it was laying plans for the even riskier and more expensive effort to return humans to the Moon.

He said he felt as if he had been hit by a two-by-four.

“Being an astronaut, there are not a lot of things that have really shocked me in my life,” Dr. Grunsfeld said in a recent interview. But, he added, “I don’t think anybody could ever prepare themselves for, you know, trying to bury something that they have said, ‘Hey, this is worth risking my life for.’ ”

He went home that January night and wondered whether he should resign.

Five years later, Dr. Grunsfeld reported for work at a six million-gallon indoor pool near the Johnson Space Center in his long underwear and a red baseball cap bearing an image of Curious George in a spacesuit. The pool’s blue depths contained sunken replicas of the Hubble and the International Space Station. Surrounded by divers and helpers, Dr. Grunsfeld squirmed into a 400-pound set of overalls known as a space suit. He was preparing to practice for his return to space.

On May 12, he and six other astronauts commanded by Scott Altman are scheduled to ride to the telescope’s rescue one last time aboard the shuttle Atlantis. This will be the fifth and last time astronauts visit Hubble. When the telescope’s batteries and gyros finally run out of juice sometime in the middle of the next decade, NASA plans to send a rocket and drop it into the ocean.

If all goes well in what Dr. Grunsfeld described as “brain surgery” in space, Hubble will be left at the apex of its scientific capability. As chief Hubble repairman for the past 18 years, he has been intertwined with the Hubble telescope physically, as well as intellectually and emotionally. “He might be the only person on Earth who has observed with Hubble and touched Hubble,” said Bruce Margon, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and former deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Last September, Dr. Grunsfeld and his crewmates were two weeks from blasting off for Hubble when a data router failed, shutting down the telescope until a backup could be booted up. The servicing mission was postponed so that NASA could prepare a replacement router, adding another degree of difficulty to an already crowded and high-stakes agenda.

To accommodate installing the new router, mission planners had to cut into the time allotted for the repair and resurrection of Hubble’s main camera, the Advanced Camera for Surveys. That repair was originally scheduled to happen over two spacewalks, and now planners are hoping to be able to do it a few hours on one spacewalk.

If it cannot be done, Dr. Grunsfeld said grimly, the pictures that have inspired people around the world, pinpointed planets around other stars and helped investigate the fate of a cosmos dominated by dark energy will be lost.

If anybody is up to the challenge, it seems to be Dr. Grunsfeld, who will be making his fifth trip to space.

Michael Turner, a cosmologist and former colleague at the University of Chicago, described Dr. Grunsfeld’s career as “Mr. Smith goes to space.” He said: “Everything turns to magic even when things go bad. In the end it gets righted and he gets to lead the team.”

Dr. Grunsfeld’s whole life has led to Hubble. Born in Chicago in 1958 into a family of architects — his grandfather designed the Adler Planetarium — Dr. Grunsfeld said he yearned from age 6 to be an astronaut. Science soon beckoned as an alternative. By the time he reached college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology his interests were centered on physics and cosmology. To make some money as an undergraduate, he took a job for $4 an hour on the graveyard shift in the control room for a small satellite, known as Sas-3, which was observing X-rays. Sometimes he took his dates there.

Photo

PRACTICE Before entering a training pool, Dr. Grunsfeld has his equipment inspected by Robert Knight of NASA.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

The job led to a year in Tokyo, where he lived in a Zen monastery, meditating in the morning and teaching and working with an X-ray astronomer, Minoru Oda, at the University of Tokyo in the afternoon. When he came home early one day and found the monks watching baseball on television, a spell was broken. He returned to Chicago to get a Ph.D. doing cosmic ray research at the University of Chicago. Along the way he married a woman he had known in high school, Carol Schiff. They now have two children, and she is an accountant at the Johnson Space Center. Dr. Grunsfeld then took a job at the California Institute of Technology, and he and his wife both learned to fly.

When NASA invited him to an interview in 1991, Dr. Grunsfeld flew his own plane to Houston. On his first space flight, a 16-day mission in 1995 tending a suite of small telescopes, Dr. Grunsfeld did not want to come down. “I had this real feeling of peace, you know, that I never had here on planet Earth.”

Dr. Grunsfeld went up again on a 10-day mission to the Mir space station, in 1997.

Then, he said, “I got lucky and got assigned to Hubble.”

Hubble had already been through high drama. Launched to great fanfare in 1990 as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo first used a telescope, it had turned out to have a misshapen mirror and was branded a “technoturkey.” In 1993, in the first on-orbit telescope servicing, astronauts installed corrective optics on Hubble, restoring the telescope’s vision and promise, and astronomers’ faith in NASA.

“The only reason Hubble works is because we have a space shuttle,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “And of all things we do, I think Hubble is probably the best thing we use it for.”

By December 1999, however, Hubble was in trouble again. Four of the six gyroscopes that keep the telescope pointed had broken down, and the telescope had gone into a so-called safe mode, suspending science operations. As a result NASA officials split a planned servicing mission into two parts and rushed the astronauts up to the telescope to replace the gyros and perform other vital tasks. Coming out of the hatch on his first spacewalk, Dr. Grunsfeld had a moment of unreality. “I mean it was just too magical. Three hundred miles below me is the Earth. There I was a meter away from the Hubble Space Telescope. I couldn’t resist. I had to take a finger and reach out and touch it.”

In one of the longest spacewalks to date, more than eight hours, Dr. Grunsfeld and his spacewalking partner, Steven Smith, replaced the telescope’s gyros, a job that Dr. Grunsfeld described as “an icky task” because the gyros are in a delicate and awkward spot. He discovered that he had a knack for getting things done Out There.

Dr. Grunsfeld said he could get so involved in his task that he would forget he was in a space suit wearing gloves, a feeling he calls the Zen of space. “And once you’re outside working, you know, all the rest of the world disappears.”

“Once in a while the universe lets you be free alone and in peace,” he said.

On his second mission to the telescope, in 2002, the cooling system in Dr. Grunsfeld’s spacesuit sprang a leak as he was about to leave the airlock, necessitating a quick change before mission control could cancel the spacewalk.

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Outside the airlock, the Zen of space took over. He thought of nothing except his task of replacing 34 tightly packed connectors in a power control unit that had not been designed to be repaired in space. “And the Zen part,” he explained, “is that I had trained myself in the challenge of connecting all these connectors to only think about one connector.” It would simply be too overwhelming to think about them all at once. “So I only ever had one connector to do.”

An ideal job, Dr. Grunsfeld said, would be to spend six months on the International Space Station. “I would like to live in space,” he said.

One of the attractions of that lifestyle is unique to physicists. When the shuttle passes through a zone in its orbit called the South Atlantic Anomaly, astronauts are exposed to large doses of cosmic rays, high-energy particles from the Sun or distant galaxies, which leave a wake of visible light as they pass through a dark-adapted human eyeball.

“In space you can get in touch with your quantum self,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “I was a human cosmic ray detector.” He said he could identify the different kinds of particles zooming through his eyeball by how bright the flashes were.

The loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven in February 2003 threw the American space program into crisis. Ultimately, as a result, the Hubble Telescope faced its greatest perils on the ground.

Photo

Grunsfeld peers into the crew cabin of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2002. Grunsfeld's helmet visor displays a mirrored image of Earth.Credit
NASA

Busy with his chief scientist duties and helping to roll out the scientific aspects to President George W. Bush’s Moon-Mars initiative in the winter of 2003-2004, Dr. Grunsfeld, who describes himself as “fat, dumb and happy,” did not see the decision to cancel Hubble coming.

When it happened, he called John Bahcall, the late astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study and behind-scenes-eminence for Hubble, and asked his advice. He could either stay and fight, probably losing, Dr. Grunsfeld told Dr. Bahcall, “Or I throw my badge down and, you know, walk away.”

Dr. Bahcall told him not to worry. If he left, the astronomical community would regard him as a hero, he would be able to get a job anywhere he wanted.

“And then there was the pregnant pause. But—” Dr. Grunsfeld recalled.

If he left, Dr. Bahcall warned, he would lose all his ability to help the rest of the science NASA was doing, X-ray satellites and gravitation-wave observatories that were dear to his heart as a high-energy physicist. There was no guarantee that anybody else would be there to protect this work.

“And that had a very calming effect on me,” Dr. Grunsfeld said, “and he was absolutely right.”

A week later, Dr. Grunsfeld presided over a news conference, defending the decision that Hubble would be abandoned. “It’s a sad day that we have to announce this,” he said. The decision meant the telescope was doomed to die in orbit by 2007 or 2008 when its batteries and gyros gave out, and it sparked worldwide consternation and criticism of Dr. Grunsfeld as well as Mr. O’Keefe.

The criticism of Dr. Grunsfeld was resented by astronomy insiders. “There was never any doubt that he was one of us,” said Dr. Margon, who was then deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “He handled it all with tremendous grace.”

Dr. Grunsfeld decided that his new job was to work within the system to save Hubble. With the support of Mr. O’Keefe, who was shaken by news reports of schoolchildren offering to pool their pennies to keep Hubble alive and working, Dr. Grunsfeld pushed a proposal by Frank Cepollina of the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to send a robot to service the telescope. The robot mission was eventually scotched by a National Academy of Sciences panel of experts. Mr. O’Keefe resigned and was replaced by Michael Griffin, who reinstated the Hubble mission. In the meantime, the engineering team at Goddard and its expertise needed for Hubble servicing had been kept alive.

“If we hadn’t gone down that road,” Dr. Grunsfeld said, “NASA would have terminated all the contracts, the big contracts, and there would be no recourse.”

Since Dr. Griffin’s decision, more has gone wrong with Hubble than could have been fixed by a robot, anyway. Two of the telescope’s most important instruments — a spectrograph named STIS, which made the first atmospheric measurements of a planet around another star, and the Advanced Camera for Surveys — have failed. Neither was designed to be repaired in space. When the advanced camera stopped working in 2007, the Hubble engineers first said that prospects for repair were poor. Now they have a plan. “For the first time,” Dr. Grunsfeld said, “we’re going to go in and open boxes of tiny screws, take circuit cards out and replace the circuit cards.”

The spectrograph has only one card, but the camera has four. Moreover, the camera is around a corner and behind a strut where it cannot be seen.

Before the recent underwater rehearsal on a sunken replica of the Hubble, Dr. Grunsfeld was showing off a pair of ultra-sensitive gloves that will help him to feel around the corners during the mission. When he climbed back out of the water, he reported that he and Dr. Andrew Feustel, his spacewalking partner, had once again managed the camera repair, and in jig time, although a foot restraint had broken partway through. That, he said, was good practice for the frustrations of real space work.

It will be with mixed emotions, Dr. Grunsfeld said, that he hugs Hubble for the last time — the last time that any human will touch it. “I try and tell myself it’s just a satellite,” he said.

But his involvement with Hubble will continue. He has been given observing time on the telescope, which he said he will use to study the Moon’s Tycho crater, formed by an impact 70 million or 90 million years ago, about the time that an asteroid is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth.

Dr. Grunsfeld said that this would probably be his last flight.

“I achieved everything I ever wanted after my first spaceflight,” he said, wearing his space monkey hat. “To be the Hubble repairman is really just unbelievable.”

Correction: April 29, 2009

An article on April 14 about John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who is scheduled to lead the final servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, referred incorrectly to the capacity of the indoor pool where Dr. Grunsfeld does some training for the mission. The pool holds 6 million gallons, not 11 million. The article also described incorrectly the events leading to his decision to return to the United States after working in Tokyo. Dr. Grunsfeld was living in a Zen monastery, meditating in the morning and then going to work at the University of Tokyo. He came home early one day and found the monks watching baseball on television, breaking the spell of his experience there. He did not find the monks playing baseball.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Last Voyage For the Keeper Of the Hubble. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe